Keith L. Camacho

About

Keith L. Camacho is a Professor and Chair at the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2005 and has trained in the anthropology, literature, and history of the Pacific Islands. His research has mainly focused on Chamorro cultural and historical politics, as well as American and Japanese colonialisms and militarisms more generally. He has held research appointments in ethnic studies, gender studies, and native studies at institutions including the Australian National University, the University of Canterbury, the University of Illinois, and the University of Sydney. From 2014 to 2018, he served as the Senior Editor of Amerasia Journal. Currently, his research includes studying Samoan youth violence and justice in Auckland, Aotearoa, and Los Angeles, California.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Ecology
• Medicine
• Law
• Geography
• History

Selected publications

• Homomilitarism

  Radical History Review · 2015-10-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines articulations for and against gay marriage in the successful legalization of Bill 232 in Hawai‘i and in the failed passage of Bill 185 in Guam to signal a profound ideological shift in the US colonization of these locations. The article likens this shift to a discursive and material process it calls “homomilitarism,” wherein the same-sex erotics of gay marriage have emerged to confront and reproduce the dominant paradigm of heteronormativity in the militarist and tourist in…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender and Sexual Politics of Pacific Island Militarisation: A Call for Critical Militarisation Studies

  2015-01-01 · 12 citations

  article

  1. Militarisation is something of a proverbial elephant in the room when considering the once and current course of empire. When Pacific militarisation has been examined, the focus often turns to the strategic military history of World War II or draws on an unreconstructed area studies, uncritically complicit with development and its methods of being realised. The Pacific Islands are therefore at both the centre and the margins of any reckoning with the colonial and neocolonial history of state…

  Publisher

• Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam

  2019-11-22 · 8 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Decolonisation and the Pacific

  Journal of Pacific History · 2016-10-01 · 5 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Since the foundation of The Journal of Pacific History in 1966, the study of decolonisation in the Pacific has never been far from the historical limelight, but the critical approaches, perspective...

  PublisherDOI

• To Our Readers; Introduction: Indigenous Asias

  Amerasia Journal · 2015-08-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This introductory essay examines the shared interests and subject matter of Asian american Studies and Indigenous Studies. In addition of summaries of the essays included in the special issue, the essay touches on matters of Asian, Asian american, and Native political movements, cultural production, and identity.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacqueline Tran

  Medical College of Wisconsin

  6 shared

• Michelle Wong

  6 shared

• Joe Fa`avae

  Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance

  6 shared

• Ashley Cheri

  6 shared

• Mary Anne Foo

  6 shared

• Rebecca Monson

  Australian National University

  4 shared

• Erin Kahunawaika'ala Wright

  3 shared

• Eric Wat

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Mercator Fellowship, Universität Potsdam, Germany, 2024
• Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda…
• Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam. Honorable…
• Fulbright US Scholar Fellowship, Fulbright New Zealand and t…
• Graduate Mentoring and Teaching Award in Asian American Stud…

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